Distorted Waves

This tutorial helps you create distorted digital waves with a slightly different end result every time. Making your image larger than it needs to be gives you flexibility to crop the best area out for your final graphic.

Step 1

Open a new image with a transparent background. Press D on your keyboard.

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Go to Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates and make sure Rectangular to Polar selected. You should have something like this:

Step 6

Next, go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur with the following settings:

Step 7

Go to Distort > Wave and copy these settings:

Step 8

Keep pressing Randomise until you get a ‘thumb’ or pattern that looks sort of like the one above, in the small box.

Step 9

Go Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Check the Colourise box and change the Hue to whatever colour you like. Change the Saturation to 25 and the Lightness to 0. Alternatively see my colourising tutorial for more details on changing the colour.

Step 10

Go to Layer > Duplicate Layer then in your Layer Palette (bottom right of your Photoshop screen), change the blending of your new layer to Overlay:

Step 11

Go to Layer > Flatten Image, then save. Here’s mine:

About Me

Welcome! I'm Jenni. I'm the co-founder of Lyrical Host and a blogger who has been writing about travel, organisation, photography, baking, blogging, life, social media, and a million other things since 2001.